MTP with Android phone unreliable on 14.04

Question

With 12.04, I was able to connect my Android phone without problem (using MTP) to my Ubuntu machine. Open Nautilus, there is my phone, and I can click through to the folders that I wanted.

However, ever since 14.04, it has been extremely unreliable. Open Nautilus, and sometimes (about a third of the time) my phone is there. When it isn't there, the only solution is to reboot Ubuntu. When it's there, clicking though to the phone's folders sometimes works, and sometimes results in an error. Even when it works, the phone will often disappear without warning halfway through browsing the folders.

I have installed mtpfs; I have also followed the how-to in the forum. I also tried replacing my USB cord in case it was faulty. No luck.

What can I do to diagnose and ultimately fix this, please?

EDIT:

The idVendor is 18d1 and the idProduct is 4ee1.

The default entry in /lib/udev/rules.d/69-libmtp.rules reads:

ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTR{idProduct}=="4ee1", SYMLINK+="libmtp-%k", MODE="660", GROUP="audio", ENV{ID_MTP_DEVICE}="1", ENV{ID_MEDIA_PLAYER}="1"

The entry in /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules reads:

ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTR{idProduct}=="4ee1", MODE=”0666"

The entry in /lib/udev/rules.d/69-mtp.rules reads:

ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTR{idProduct}=="4ee1", SYMLINK+="libmtp-%k", ENV{ID_MTP_DEVICE}="1", ENV{ID_MEDIA_PLAYER}="1"

Answer 1

I had the same problem on a machine when I 'upgraded' the distribution from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. There were a lot of other issues with the 'upgrade', so I just reformatted and installed 14.04 on the empty drive to solve ALL my problems. The upgrade seemed like it worked, but the more I used it, the more it was obvious that there were a ton of little things that were broken that made the system frustrating to use. (wacky java and other lib problems.... HW-stuff broken or unreliable like this, etc...)

Try booting from a 'live USB' version of 14.04 and see if that fixes this problem, if it does, you may have other issues and it'd be easiest to backup what you need and re-install to fix all of it at once.

Answer 2

As far as I know, MTP works fine in Trusty. You can try this:

1. Uncomment #user_allow_other in /etc/fuse.conf.

2. Run lsusb and see your device's vendor ID. It will be something like 1d6b:0002.

3. Add the following line to /lib/udev/rules.d/69-libmtp.rules.

   ATTR{idVendor}=="1d6b", ATTR{idProduct}=="0002", SYMLINK+="libmtp-%k", ENV{ID_MTP_DEVICE}="1", ENV{ID_MEDIA_PLAYER}="1"

4. Add the following line to /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules.

   ATTR{idVendor}=="1d6b", ATTR{idProduct}=="0002", MODE=”0666"

5. sudo service udev restart

6. sudo reboot

Replace the Vendor and Device IDs of course.

Like I said, MTP should work out of the box, but the above manually adds relevant entries to your devices list.